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Sunday, April 12, 2015

Every day is a winding road

So I have had tonsillitis over the past 5 or 6 days, and it's been not very nice, but these things happen to everyone from time to time. If my body was roughly normal for a 41-year-old woman, a few bad days and a fistful of penicillin would see me right and that would be the end of that.

However, as was fairly clearly established last year, I am not actually all that normal, clever collector of auto-immune illnesses that I am.

The confounding pressure of both the tonsillitis itself and the antibiotics has interfered with my management of my chronic health problems (which was going quite smoothly really) and has left me with crashing fatigue, shakes, joint ill, muscle weakness and a tsunami of anxiety-related mood disturbance.

None of this is terribly unexpected - the nature of having a funky immune system is that major challenges to it will be met with a furiously exaggerated response by my hyper-vigilant body, which then saps my capacity for Going About My Daily Business for quite some time. The antibiotic's interference with my other medication has also dropped me down from a height emotionally, which hasn't been exceptionally nice.

Thus, while I am returning to work tomorrow, I'm not going back to the office. I'm going to work at home for at least the first part of the week, to give myself a bit more time to feel well enough to commute, to have meetings, to exert myself to put on the work game face we all have to wear. At home, I can churn through quantities of document-intensive work (and boy howdy is there a lot of it to do!) without having to expend precious energy in dressing up, driving, and the social performative aspect of work, which is by far the most draining part for me when I am unwell.

Working at home was how I got through my big health crash last year. This is a mere zygote of a health crisis in comparison - not even in the same postcode - but I firmly believe that acting early and doing what I know works for me is the best way to stave off a more precipitate dive back to depths I do not want to explore ever again.